The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
In response to my last, Vermouth1991 objected to the Hogwarts Express as follows:
Re: taking the train
I've always found it a rather shite idea for all British magical students to gather over to that one station in London and then ride the train all the way north into Scotland, without stopping anywhere in between so that some northern English or Scottish persons can hop onto the Express on stations more closer to their homes. And the train stops at Hogsmeade anyway, not within the magical protection sphere of Hogwarts itself. Why can't more half-blood or pureblooded families just travel directly to Hogsmeade and wait until the rest of the students arrive and then take the Thestral carriages?
Really vermouth1991 touched on almost all of the relevant issues. Why not, indeed?
If we start with the assumption that many stupid-looking traditions are either useful in themselves (in ways not obvious to outsiders or not admitted to be such) or, failing that, are the survivals of patterns of behavior that were once meaningful or useful….
(I recommend before reading this that you review Whitehound’s “Location, Location” series of essays-I used hir regularization of JKR’s Hogwarts/Hogsmeade/environs map, as well as calculations for the Hogwarts Express speed and information about London magical sites. Actually, I recommend hir essays, full stop.)
*
As to the train-blandly expecting all families sending their children off for a Hogwarts education to send them off likewise on the (non-stopping) Hogwarts Express would make a lot of logistical sense if (and only if) most Wizarding families were expected to live either in Hogsmeade or in one of a very few mixed population centers in the south--Diagon Alley, Ottery St. Catchpole, Godric's Hollow.... You're supposed to stick with your own, you see, in enclaves of at least a few magical families, not to run off and marry Muggles from nowhere and raise half-blood children on Muggle dung heaps.
Suppose that many of the Scottish and northern English Wizarding communities had been wiped out shortly before-and partly inspiring-the Statute of Secrecy? In real life, the last major “executions’-judicially-excused mass murders-for witchcraft in England were in Pendle, Lancashire in 1612, while Scotland suffered such massacres through the 1660’s….
And while Muggleborns can pop up anywhere, who cares about their families’ convenience?
In that particular conjunction of circumstances, requiring ALL magical students to meet in London first and then go on to school from there would make admirable sense. Inconveniencing (some of the) Muggle families, punishing (some of) those marrying out, and rewarding those staying within the established southern enclaves-all without ever having to admit to any such motivations. What could be better?
Plus, we know that Hogwarts is protected so that one cannot Apparate there, and it's clear that Floo access (and presumably Portkey) is likewise extremely restricted (we see either used only at the headmaster’s pleasure). (Even Tom, even when the headmaster was [supposedly] his creature, walked from the gates. And the security breach Draco exploited was created by someone else-Phineas, it has been speculated-bringing one of a twinned set of vanishing cabinets into the castle.)
So it’s impossible for families to bring their kids straight to school in any of the fastest and easiest ways.
Hogsmeade, however, is not protected in the same way.
Which is not to say that it’s not protected in other ways.
There might be a completely separate reason to insist that students-particularly first-years, including Muggleborns-especially Muggleborns- take a ridiculously torturous, lengthy, and inconvenient method of getting to school.
*
Item: As Vermouth1991 pointed out, once we become familiar with Wizarding transportation beyond the broomstick, it becomes clear that any Wizarding World family could with far less trouble (and possibly expense) Side-along Apparate or Portkey their minor children to the front gate at Hogwarts, or Floo with them to the Three Broomsticks, and just walk the kids over in time for the Sorting Feast.
Yet the Weasleys, the Malfoys, the Potters, the Blacks, the Longbottoms, never do so. Instead they struggle (in some cases complaining bitterly) through the very heart of Muggle London, to send their children off on the Hogwarts Express. Only in a few emergencies do we ever see students (and never first-years) travel to or from school in any other manner.
Item: And yet almost no adults do. The only adults we ever saw on the Express were the trolley lady, Lupin, and Slughorn. Oh, and Hermione was able to track down one conductor at the front of the train, who never came through any of the carriages. No parents travel with their children, nor are there (in general) teachers on board to supervise the students. Such supervision as might occur must be performed by prefects-and we never saw prefects intervene during or after any altercation Harry and his gang had with Draco, nor help students who’ve lost pets, nor check that students weren’t left on the train, injured and unable to move….
Item: The Hogwarts “Express” should rather, asserts Whitehound, be called the Hogwarts “Snail Rail”-it has to be significantly slower than Muggle British trains to take as long as it does (over ten hours-from 11 am to after the 9 pm Scottish sunset) to traverse the distance from London to Scotland.
Item: The only time the train ever stopped en route was when it was halted by Dementors searching for Sirius Black. Are there really NO Wizarding enclaves in central or northern England, or in Scotland outside Hogsmeade, to justify building a platform where students living far from London could pick up the Hogwarts Express en route?
Item: On a ten hour trip, the trolley lady comes through only once, in early afternoon. And she appears to have only sweets on her cart.
Item: Hogsmeade Station is very inconveniently located relative to Hogsmeade-and indeed to Hogwarts. It’s on the far side of the Hogwarts grounds from both the school’s front entrance and the village. Once one has debarked from the train, one has to travel up a lane to get to either the village or the school’s front gates. The distance from the station is far enough that having to walk it (even without luggage) strikes Harry as an imposition. Or one can follow a much shorter, but narrow and unlit, footpath down to the Hogwarts coracles, and travel in them over the lake to Hogwarts’ water gate.
The station is completely out of view of either the village or the castle.
And yet there is that carriage lane-easily wide enough to have accommodated a continuation of the railway tracks, so that the station might have been built nearer to the school’s main entrance and to the village. Hogsmeade Station might have been built in view of and in easy walking distance of both.
For some reason this was felt not to be desirable.
Item: When the Hogwarts Express arrives, the station is unlit. Students disembark in the dark.
Item: Even when the weather is a near-gale, first years traditionally cross the lake (inhabited by mers and grindylows, patrolled by the giant squid) on coracles. Then they enter a concealed (and very low-children have to duck to keep from being injured) water gate under the cliff on which the castle is built, and pass (at least, so Harry thinks) under the castle itself to an underground harbor. They then have to clamber up a rock tunnel that debouches onto the lawn near the front entrance.
First year students leave at the end of the year by the same route.
Returning students, however, are carried by thestral-drawn carriages through the front gates.
Item: Until Harry (notorious for rule-breaking) tells Albus Severus in the epilogue, no entering student seems to know that sorting into houses is performed by a hat, nor that the hat will consider the child’s preferences. (Otherwise fear of being assigned to an undesired house would not be near-universal among pureblood children. Moreover, if it were permissible to allay first-years’ fears, Percy would surely have explained to Ron what to expect, rather than leaving him to panic over the twins’ deliberately terrifying misinformation; similarly, if the nature of the test had been published in Hogwarts, a [Partial] History, Hermione would not have been wondering what spells she’d need as she waited with the others to be called.)
(BTW-does the hat’s telepathy imply that Godric himself was an accomplished Legilimens, or that all of the Founders were? Was that how each originally picked hir students?)
So. Let’s review how a new student’s entrance to Hogwarts actually works.
Bearing in mind that what appear to us to be bugs may instead be design features. And that what we see now is a mid to late Victorian adaptation, at a time when most first-year students were eleven-year-old children formally untutored in magic, of a procedure that may date back to near the founding, when candidates to study with the Hogwarts masters might have been of any age and background.
*
Consider:
Admission to Hogwarts is by invitation only.
Candidates for admission must travel for most of the day. They travel through Muggle London with their families, go through a magical portal, and then must continue with only each other for companions.
Candidates deal as they can with fellow students (many of them nearly qualified witches and wizards) without interference by authorities.
Candidates are fed only once, early in the afternoon, and then only if they have the forethought to bring food or coin.
The trip is long enough to ensure that Polyjuice or short-lived glamours could not be used to impersonate a candidate-indeed, long enough that someone trying to use a long-lived glamour or a flask full of Polyjuice to impersonate anyone known to other students would likely betray hirself. (Note that Barty Crouch did not, that we saw, make a habit of indulging in ten-hour tete-a-tetes with Alastor Moody’s friends-also that the authorities feared that Sirius Black, who had unknown powers of concealing himself, might try to make his way to Hogwarts via the train.)
Candidates arrive after sunset at a dark unknown location with no nearby habitations.
Fasting.
Candidates follow a guide, on foot, down a narrow, steep, dark path. They enter onto Hogwarts grounds without being able to identify the boundary. They cross on tiny boats over dark water patrolled by monsters, and then ascend a tunnel through the earth, coming out at last into the air near a flight of steps that they climb to gain entrance to the castle.
Oh, and candidates undergo all this knowing that they are subject to a final, unknown test.
This test turns out to be being subjected to the interrogation of a telepathic magical object, which places them under the direct authority and supervision of one of four masters.
After all this, candidates are made free of Hogwarts Castle and its grounds, and are welcomed with a feast to the fellowship of the other students.
This is a watered-down-for-the-children initiation. In fact, the remnants of a trial by ordeal.
Not only that, look at the security aspects of this procedure. Suppose a candidate did not pass the trial? S/he would never have seen either the main gates nor the village nor even the breach in the outer wall through which s/he entered the school grounds! And s/he would have traveled in a manner that would preclude any but the cleverest of knowing even the location very exactly-note that Harry and Ron’s only idea of how to get there by flying was to follow the train.
If knowing a precise location is a prerequisite for Apparition, a rejected candidate could not even Apparate back to the vicinity. By the time s/he is anywhere well-lit enough to look for identifying characteristics, s/he is within Hogwarts itself. (Everyone, now, chorus after Hermione, “You can’t Apparate….”)
(One wonders if the mode of transport superseded by the train was thestral carriages. Airborne. Perhaps with the candidates blind for part of the journey.)
Moreover, admitted candidates are still not made free of the front gates until completing a full year’s trial. Nor of Hogsmeade for a full two years. Had Harry been expelled when he blew up Aunt Marge, he would never have seen Hogsmeade nor known how to get there.
Second-years Ron and Harry, circling down over the castle in that flying Ford Anglia, didn’t even see the largish village just outside the Hogwarts walls. Because they hadn’t been given the freedom of the village yet?
Hogwarts may be, among other things, the gatekeeper for Hogsmeade.
What did Hermione say about accidentally piggybacking that Death Eater to Fidelius-kept Grimmauld Place? That once he’d been brought in by her, he could bring in others?
How the Fidelius works after the death of the original Secret-Keeper-that may be the original (and very ancient) version of the spell. Anyone who’s an initiate can initiate others. It’s a secret only from those who’ve never been let to know.
Note that one cannot enter Diagon Alley the first time without a guide who is hirself both magical and initiate to show you the way. The same may be true of both Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. And if you’re an outsider, you need to prove yourself at Hogwarts before being allowed into the village.
What did Hermione tell us about Durmstrang? That it was hidden, not just from Muggles, but from magical non-alumni? The same may be true of Hogwarts, only the fact would go unnoticed among the magicals we meet in canon, because everyone Harry knows IS a Hogwarts alumn.
Or, all of them except the foreigners. There may be a second reason why the magical schools stopped holding the Triwizard Tournament, which requires the host school to open itself to the contestants. Dumbledore’s stated reason for resurrecting it was to promote international cooperation, yes? And it was he who opened his school. Maybe he hoped for foreign assistance should Hogwarts finally be overcome by the native-reared Dark Lord.
But he didn’t open Hogsmeade to them-the foreign students were not given Hogsmeade weekends. (Yes, I just finished checking GoF for that.)
*
Of course, if the Sorting was the final trial undergone by candidates, we have to call an epic fail concerning Tom Riddle. Should not the hat have seen that Tom was unsafe to admit and teach?
There are several possible solutions to that problem.
The simplest, of course, is that the security arrangements regarding admitting students to Hogwarts never did include giving a telepathic hat authority to reject candidates as unsuitable (or to recommend rejection). The hat only, ever, was allowed to sort a candidate into one of the four houses of Hogwarts, never to proclaim, “None of the above. Get thee hence, churl!”
(But I’m sorry-would even Helga Hvalpuf, that indomitably optimistic believer than any child, however barbaric its background and rearing, could accept civilization and knowledge, given the chance-have accepted an empathy-free boyling as her disciple in the Dark Arts?)
However, there are other possibilities. Since the main danger against which the Founders probably sought to guard (with respect to incoming students, anyway) was sympathy for a Muggle pogrom, the hat may have been suspicious only of vehemently pro-Muggle and/or anti-magical sentiments. Whatever his faults of mind and however they would show up to an inanimate object’s scrutiny, Tom Riddle would certainly present as utterly clear of pro-Muggle leanings. Further, the first thing Albus taught Tom was that if he wanted to succeed in the WW, Tom needed to disguise his proclivities. If the Sorting Ceremony were done alphabetically, as in Harry’s time, Tommy would have had quite some time to realize that the hat was telepathic, and to come up with a cloak of virtuously ambitious feelings to present to it. He’s almost certainly a natural Occlumens.
And in truth, Tom’s aspirations on entering Hogwarts did not include destroying pureblood culture and most of the old families by promoting their delusions of pureblood superiority. That came later. Fourth year, perhaps, if that’s when he traced the name “Marvolo,” or maybe only after he actually met his surviving Wizarding family.
Come to that, if a part-goblin halfbreed-such as Filius is hypothesized to be-were presented as a potential student, would the hat have vetted said candidate for undue sympathy for hir goblin forebears, lest s/he open the gates of Hogwarts to the next goblin insurrection? Was Hagrid sniffed for sympathy to giants?
A third option might be that the hat did initially have the authority to issue recommendations to exclude students, only to have been stripped of that power later. When policies changed so that the accepted solution to the security problem posed by Muggleborns was to recruit them all and try to co-opt them.
Fourth, the celerity of the Sorting in some cases indicates that the hat’s scrutiny was superficial if the house choice were immediately apparent. But then, the Hat is inanimate. Just because it passes the Turing test with Harry does not mean it would with an adult trying to converse with it.
It might have been running mechanically through a relatively simple decision tree that went: overwhelming desire for a specific house? Done. (Harry, remember, was praying, not “Gryffindor!” but “Not Slytherin!”-a decision between houses still had to be made in his case.) No? Then, a strong desire to be brave, smart, work hard to fit in, prove oneself best? Done! No? Not one of the above characteristics stands out clearly above the others? Only then, dig a little deeper, to see which of several impulses most governed the student….
In which case, it might or might not have done a first automatic check for Muggle sympathies (or anti-WW ones). But it could hardly have been programmed to look for every possible sign that a child might be a bad ‘un-how could it? And it may not have been programmed to track the fates of the candidates who’d passed under its scrutiny and to learn from its millennium of experience.
Or, again, it might never have been programmed to look for danger at all (which seems unlikely, since it was the Founders’ solution to how to choose candidates to be inducted into their houses), or that programming might have been taken out later.
If the hat were at all a sophisticated artifact, though, you’d have expected it to have noticed something about Tom Riddle. At least enough to induce it to warn the headmaster to watch this one carefully…. Or rather, to warn the student’s head of house. The headmaster is an administrator, responsible for no student directly. Who knows when that post was even invented? The hat was made by the four heads of houses; it has always been they who stood responsible for teaching, guiding, and guarding individual students.
So it’s Tom’s head of house whom the hat should have warned.
And perhaps it did.
Perhaps it did, and Tom’s head of house pooh-poohed the warning. Such a fine, talented, eager to learn, and above all, respectful and polite, orphan. A model student, what can you be thinking, hat? That would certainly be reason for shame later, when Tom did finally demonstrate that the hat had been right to urge keeping a wary eye on him. It would be mortifying to have to admit that an item of clothing is a better judge of character than oneself.
Or, perhaps it did. And Tom’s head of house assured the hat that he had already independently formed the intention of watching over this orphan with especial care.
Perhaps, even, the hat was disturbed by what it saw in Tom’s mind and memories, and it decided to accept the boy for Slytherin in part because that head of house had already met Riddle, knew all about his disquieting activities and inclinations, and had given his personal approval to Tom’s attendance. The hat might have assumed that the head of Slytherin, forewarned, could be trusted to monitor and guide the child.
Especially if the hat knew that this particular head of Slytherin had himself come to grief at a young age through allowing his unbridled ambition to overwhelm his care for others, had subsequently done penance by refusing positions of power, and had returned to Hogwarts, the proverbially sadder and wiser man, to devote himself to guiding the young to make better choices than his.
Yes, I know. Slughorn was the former head of Slytherin house. We all know that.
But we don’t know exactly when.
And after all, in HBP when Albus offered Horace the Potions position, he did not offer him the headship of Slytherin. Because someone else had tenure in that position. So instead, Horace devoted his free time to running a sort of brokering service, a little Club, whose purpose was to introduce selected wizards of influence and talent to each other.
A club he seemed to have been running in Tom Riddle’s time.
There might be a very good reason indeed for Albus Dumbledore in later years to have ensured that his true House became impossible to determine.
Re: taking the train
I've always found it a rather shite idea for all British magical students to gather over to that one station in London and then ride the train all the way north into Scotland, without stopping anywhere in between so that some northern English or Scottish persons can hop onto the Express on stations more closer to their homes. And the train stops at Hogsmeade anyway, not within the magical protection sphere of Hogwarts itself. Why can't more half-blood or pureblooded families just travel directly to Hogsmeade and wait until the rest of the students arrive and then take the Thestral carriages?
Really vermouth1991 touched on almost all of the relevant issues. Why not, indeed?
If we start with the assumption that many stupid-looking traditions are either useful in themselves (in ways not obvious to outsiders or not admitted to be such) or, failing that, are the survivals of patterns of behavior that were once meaningful or useful….
(I recommend before reading this that you review Whitehound’s “Location, Location” series of essays-I used hir regularization of JKR’s Hogwarts/Hogsmeade/environs map, as well as calculations for the Hogwarts Express speed and information about London magical sites. Actually, I recommend hir essays, full stop.)
*
As to the train-blandly expecting all families sending their children off for a Hogwarts education to send them off likewise on the (non-stopping) Hogwarts Express would make a lot of logistical sense if (and only if) most Wizarding families were expected to live either in Hogsmeade or in one of a very few mixed population centers in the south--Diagon Alley, Ottery St. Catchpole, Godric's Hollow.... You're supposed to stick with your own, you see, in enclaves of at least a few magical families, not to run off and marry Muggles from nowhere and raise half-blood children on Muggle dung heaps.
Suppose that many of the Scottish and northern English Wizarding communities had been wiped out shortly before-and partly inspiring-the Statute of Secrecy? In real life, the last major “executions’-judicially-excused mass murders-for witchcraft in England were in Pendle, Lancashire in 1612, while Scotland suffered such massacres through the 1660’s….
And while Muggleborns can pop up anywhere, who cares about their families’ convenience?
In that particular conjunction of circumstances, requiring ALL magical students to meet in London first and then go on to school from there would make admirable sense. Inconveniencing (some of the) Muggle families, punishing (some of) those marrying out, and rewarding those staying within the established southern enclaves-all without ever having to admit to any such motivations. What could be better?
Plus, we know that Hogwarts is protected so that one cannot Apparate there, and it's clear that Floo access (and presumably Portkey) is likewise extremely restricted (we see either used only at the headmaster’s pleasure). (Even Tom, even when the headmaster was [supposedly] his creature, walked from the gates. And the security breach Draco exploited was created by someone else-Phineas, it has been speculated-bringing one of a twinned set of vanishing cabinets into the castle.)
So it’s impossible for families to bring their kids straight to school in any of the fastest and easiest ways.
Hogsmeade, however, is not protected in the same way.
Which is not to say that it’s not protected in other ways.
There might be a completely separate reason to insist that students-particularly first-years, including Muggleborns-especially Muggleborns- take a ridiculously torturous, lengthy, and inconvenient method of getting to school.
*
Item: As Vermouth1991 pointed out, once we become familiar with Wizarding transportation beyond the broomstick, it becomes clear that any Wizarding World family could with far less trouble (and possibly expense) Side-along Apparate or Portkey their minor children to the front gate at Hogwarts, or Floo with them to the Three Broomsticks, and just walk the kids over in time for the Sorting Feast.
Yet the Weasleys, the Malfoys, the Potters, the Blacks, the Longbottoms, never do so. Instead they struggle (in some cases complaining bitterly) through the very heart of Muggle London, to send their children off on the Hogwarts Express. Only in a few emergencies do we ever see students (and never first-years) travel to or from school in any other manner.
Item: And yet almost no adults do. The only adults we ever saw on the Express were the trolley lady, Lupin, and Slughorn. Oh, and Hermione was able to track down one conductor at the front of the train, who never came through any of the carriages. No parents travel with their children, nor are there (in general) teachers on board to supervise the students. Such supervision as might occur must be performed by prefects-and we never saw prefects intervene during or after any altercation Harry and his gang had with Draco, nor help students who’ve lost pets, nor check that students weren’t left on the train, injured and unable to move….
Item: The Hogwarts “Express” should rather, asserts Whitehound, be called the Hogwarts “Snail Rail”-it has to be significantly slower than Muggle British trains to take as long as it does (over ten hours-from 11 am to after the 9 pm Scottish sunset) to traverse the distance from London to Scotland.
Item: The only time the train ever stopped en route was when it was halted by Dementors searching for Sirius Black. Are there really NO Wizarding enclaves in central or northern England, or in Scotland outside Hogsmeade, to justify building a platform where students living far from London could pick up the Hogwarts Express en route?
Item: On a ten hour trip, the trolley lady comes through only once, in early afternoon. And she appears to have only sweets on her cart.
Item: Hogsmeade Station is very inconveniently located relative to Hogsmeade-and indeed to Hogwarts. It’s on the far side of the Hogwarts grounds from both the school’s front entrance and the village. Once one has debarked from the train, one has to travel up a lane to get to either the village or the school’s front gates. The distance from the station is far enough that having to walk it (even without luggage) strikes Harry as an imposition. Or one can follow a much shorter, but narrow and unlit, footpath down to the Hogwarts coracles, and travel in them over the lake to Hogwarts’ water gate.
The station is completely out of view of either the village or the castle.
And yet there is that carriage lane-easily wide enough to have accommodated a continuation of the railway tracks, so that the station might have been built nearer to the school’s main entrance and to the village. Hogsmeade Station might have been built in view of and in easy walking distance of both.
For some reason this was felt not to be desirable.
Item: When the Hogwarts Express arrives, the station is unlit. Students disembark in the dark.
Item: Even when the weather is a near-gale, first years traditionally cross the lake (inhabited by mers and grindylows, patrolled by the giant squid) on coracles. Then they enter a concealed (and very low-children have to duck to keep from being injured) water gate under the cliff on which the castle is built, and pass (at least, so Harry thinks) under the castle itself to an underground harbor. They then have to clamber up a rock tunnel that debouches onto the lawn near the front entrance.
First year students leave at the end of the year by the same route.
Returning students, however, are carried by thestral-drawn carriages through the front gates.
Item: Until Harry (notorious for rule-breaking) tells Albus Severus in the epilogue, no entering student seems to know that sorting into houses is performed by a hat, nor that the hat will consider the child’s preferences. (Otherwise fear of being assigned to an undesired house would not be near-universal among pureblood children. Moreover, if it were permissible to allay first-years’ fears, Percy would surely have explained to Ron what to expect, rather than leaving him to panic over the twins’ deliberately terrifying misinformation; similarly, if the nature of the test had been published in Hogwarts, a [Partial] History, Hermione would not have been wondering what spells she’d need as she waited with the others to be called.)
(BTW-does the hat’s telepathy imply that Godric himself was an accomplished Legilimens, or that all of the Founders were? Was that how each originally picked hir students?)
So. Let’s review how a new student’s entrance to Hogwarts actually works.
Bearing in mind that what appear to us to be bugs may instead be design features. And that what we see now is a mid to late Victorian adaptation, at a time when most first-year students were eleven-year-old children formally untutored in magic, of a procedure that may date back to near the founding, when candidates to study with the Hogwarts masters might have been of any age and background.
*
Consider:
Admission to Hogwarts is by invitation only.
Candidates for admission must travel for most of the day. They travel through Muggle London with their families, go through a magical portal, and then must continue with only each other for companions.
Candidates deal as they can with fellow students (many of them nearly qualified witches and wizards) without interference by authorities.
Candidates are fed only once, early in the afternoon, and then only if they have the forethought to bring food or coin.
The trip is long enough to ensure that Polyjuice or short-lived glamours could not be used to impersonate a candidate-indeed, long enough that someone trying to use a long-lived glamour or a flask full of Polyjuice to impersonate anyone known to other students would likely betray hirself. (Note that Barty Crouch did not, that we saw, make a habit of indulging in ten-hour tete-a-tetes with Alastor Moody’s friends-also that the authorities feared that Sirius Black, who had unknown powers of concealing himself, might try to make his way to Hogwarts via the train.)
Candidates arrive after sunset at a dark unknown location with no nearby habitations.
Fasting.
Candidates follow a guide, on foot, down a narrow, steep, dark path. They enter onto Hogwarts grounds without being able to identify the boundary. They cross on tiny boats over dark water patrolled by monsters, and then ascend a tunnel through the earth, coming out at last into the air near a flight of steps that they climb to gain entrance to the castle.
Oh, and candidates undergo all this knowing that they are subject to a final, unknown test.
This test turns out to be being subjected to the interrogation of a telepathic magical object, which places them under the direct authority and supervision of one of four masters.
After all this, candidates are made free of Hogwarts Castle and its grounds, and are welcomed with a feast to the fellowship of the other students.
This is a watered-down-for-the-children initiation. In fact, the remnants of a trial by ordeal.
Not only that, look at the security aspects of this procedure. Suppose a candidate did not pass the trial? S/he would never have seen either the main gates nor the village nor even the breach in the outer wall through which s/he entered the school grounds! And s/he would have traveled in a manner that would preclude any but the cleverest of knowing even the location very exactly-note that Harry and Ron’s only idea of how to get there by flying was to follow the train.
If knowing a precise location is a prerequisite for Apparition, a rejected candidate could not even Apparate back to the vicinity. By the time s/he is anywhere well-lit enough to look for identifying characteristics, s/he is within Hogwarts itself. (Everyone, now, chorus after Hermione, “You can’t Apparate….”)
(One wonders if the mode of transport superseded by the train was thestral carriages. Airborne. Perhaps with the candidates blind for part of the journey.)
Moreover, admitted candidates are still not made free of the front gates until completing a full year’s trial. Nor of Hogsmeade for a full two years. Had Harry been expelled when he blew up Aunt Marge, he would never have seen Hogsmeade nor known how to get there.
Second-years Ron and Harry, circling down over the castle in that flying Ford Anglia, didn’t even see the largish village just outside the Hogwarts walls. Because they hadn’t been given the freedom of the village yet?
Hogwarts may be, among other things, the gatekeeper for Hogsmeade.
What did Hermione say about accidentally piggybacking that Death Eater to Fidelius-kept Grimmauld Place? That once he’d been brought in by her, he could bring in others?
How the Fidelius works after the death of the original Secret-Keeper-that may be the original (and very ancient) version of the spell. Anyone who’s an initiate can initiate others. It’s a secret only from those who’ve never been let to know.
Note that one cannot enter Diagon Alley the first time without a guide who is hirself both magical and initiate to show you the way. The same may be true of both Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. And if you’re an outsider, you need to prove yourself at Hogwarts before being allowed into the village.
What did Hermione tell us about Durmstrang? That it was hidden, not just from Muggles, but from magical non-alumni? The same may be true of Hogwarts, only the fact would go unnoticed among the magicals we meet in canon, because everyone Harry knows IS a Hogwarts alumn.
Or, all of them except the foreigners. There may be a second reason why the magical schools stopped holding the Triwizard Tournament, which requires the host school to open itself to the contestants. Dumbledore’s stated reason for resurrecting it was to promote international cooperation, yes? And it was he who opened his school. Maybe he hoped for foreign assistance should Hogwarts finally be overcome by the native-reared Dark Lord.
But he didn’t open Hogsmeade to them-the foreign students were not given Hogsmeade weekends. (Yes, I just finished checking GoF for that.)
*
Of course, if the Sorting was the final trial undergone by candidates, we have to call an epic fail concerning Tom Riddle. Should not the hat have seen that Tom was unsafe to admit and teach?
There are several possible solutions to that problem.
The simplest, of course, is that the security arrangements regarding admitting students to Hogwarts never did include giving a telepathic hat authority to reject candidates as unsuitable (or to recommend rejection). The hat only, ever, was allowed to sort a candidate into one of the four houses of Hogwarts, never to proclaim, “None of the above. Get thee hence, churl!”
(But I’m sorry-would even Helga Hvalpuf, that indomitably optimistic believer than any child, however barbaric its background and rearing, could accept civilization and knowledge, given the chance-have accepted an empathy-free boyling as her disciple in the Dark Arts?)
However, there are other possibilities. Since the main danger against which the Founders probably sought to guard (with respect to incoming students, anyway) was sympathy for a Muggle pogrom, the hat may have been suspicious only of vehemently pro-Muggle and/or anti-magical sentiments. Whatever his faults of mind and however they would show up to an inanimate object’s scrutiny, Tom Riddle would certainly present as utterly clear of pro-Muggle leanings. Further, the first thing Albus taught Tom was that if he wanted to succeed in the WW, Tom needed to disguise his proclivities. If the Sorting Ceremony were done alphabetically, as in Harry’s time, Tommy would have had quite some time to realize that the hat was telepathic, and to come up with a cloak of virtuously ambitious feelings to present to it. He’s almost certainly a natural Occlumens.
And in truth, Tom’s aspirations on entering Hogwarts did not include destroying pureblood culture and most of the old families by promoting their delusions of pureblood superiority. That came later. Fourth year, perhaps, if that’s when he traced the name “Marvolo,” or maybe only after he actually met his surviving Wizarding family.
Come to that, if a part-goblin halfbreed-such as Filius is hypothesized to be-were presented as a potential student, would the hat have vetted said candidate for undue sympathy for hir goblin forebears, lest s/he open the gates of Hogwarts to the next goblin insurrection? Was Hagrid sniffed for sympathy to giants?
A third option might be that the hat did initially have the authority to issue recommendations to exclude students, only to have been stripped of that power later. When policies changed so that the accepted solution to the security problem posed by Muggleborns was to recruit them all and try to co-opt them.
Fourth, the celerity of the Sorting in some cases indicates that the hat’s scrutiny was superficial if the house choice were immediately apparent. But then, the Hat is inanimate. Just because it passes the Turing test with Harry does not mean it would with an adult trying to converse with it.
It might have been running mechanically through a relatively simple decision tree that went: overwhelming desire for a specific house? Done. (Harry, remember, was praying, not “Gryffindor!” but “Not Slytherin!”-a decision between houses still had to be made in his case.) No? Then, a strong desire to be brave, smart, work hard to fit in, prove oneself best? Done! No? Not one of the above characteristics stands out clearly above the others? Only then, dig a little deeper, to see which of several impulses most governed the student….
In which case, it might or might not have done a first automatic check for Muggle sympathies (or anti-WW ones). But it could hardly have been programmed to look for every possible sign that a child might be a bad ‘un-how could it? And it may not have been programmed to track the fates of the candidates who’d passed under its scrutiny and to learn from its millennium of experience.
Or, again, it might never have been programmed to look for danger at all (which seems unlikely, since it was the Founders’ solution to how to choose candidates to be inducted into their houses), or that programming might have been taken out later.
If the hat were at all a sophisticated artifact, though, you’d have expected it to have noticed something about Tom Riddle. At least enough to induce it to warn the headmaster to watch this one carefully…. Or rather, to warn the student’s head of house. The headmaster is an administrator, responsible for no student directly. Who knows when that post was even invented? The hat was made by the four heads of houses; it has always been they who stood responsible for teaching, guiding, and guarding individual students.
So it’s Tom’s head of house whom the hat should have warned.
And perhaps it did.
Perhaps it did, and Tom’s head of house pooh-poohed the warning. Such a fine, talented, eager to learn, and above all, respectful and polite, orphan. A model student, what can you be thinking, hat? That would certainly be reason for shame later, when Tom did finally demonstrate that the hat had been right to urge keeping a wary eye on him. It would be mortifying to have to admit that an item of clothing is a better judge of character than oneself.
Or, perhaps it did. And Tom’s head of house assured the hat that he had already independently formed the intention of watching over this orphan with especial care.
Perhaps, even, the hat was disturbed by what it saw in Tom’s mind and memories, and it decided to accept the boy for Slytherin in part because that head of house had already met Riddle, knew all about his disquieting activities and inclinations, and had given his personal approval to Tom’s attendance. The hat might have assumed that the head of Slytherin, forewarned, could be trusted to monitor and guide the child.
Especially if the hat knew that this particular head of Slytherin had himself come to grief at a young age through allowing his unbridled ambition to overwhelm his care for others, had subsequently done penance by refusing positions of power, and had returned to Hogwarts, the proverbially sadder and wiser man, to devote himself to guiding the young to make better choices than his.
Yes, I know. Slughorn was the former head of Slytherin house. We all know that.
But we don’t know exactly when.
And after all, in HBP when Albus offered Horace the Potions position, he did not offer him the headship of Slytherin. Because someone else had tenure in that position. So instead, Horace devoted his free time to running a sort of brokering service, a little Club, whose purpose was to introduce selected wizards of influence and talent to each other.
A club he seemed to have been running in Tom Riddle’s time.
There might be a very good reason indeed for Albus Dumbledore in later years to have ensured that his true House became impossible to determine.